5 Fast, Effective Ways to Implement Knowledge Automation Now
You’ve made a new hire. Except this worker’s a little different. This one learns very quickly on the job, takes on massive amounts of work, and seems to execute flawlessly. In fact, this worker has learned to handle so many tasks at once that everyone else has more time to focus on more complicated projects and higher-level decisions.
The “worker” is arago’s HIRO. Instead of using standard automation, HIRO uses advanced AI to provide knowledge automation—a whole new kind of automation solution that mimics how humans learn and apply knowledge.
With knowledge automation, HIRO can learn business functions, adapt to changes, and swiftly start impacting the bottom line. In this post, we dive into five ways that knowledge automation can immediately impact Finance, IT, and HR departments.
IT Service Desk
1. Automate Many L1 and L2 Service Desk Tickets
From resetting a user’s password to answering basic connectivity questions, service desks in IT departments tend to get many Level 1 and 2 tickets. As a result, workers can get bogged down handling these repetitive but nevertheless important tasks.
With knowledge automation, you can reduce help desk service times by automating up to 90% of these tasks. In fact, one Swiss telecommunications provider did. As a result, the company automated over 150+ tasks, saved over 100,000-man hours, and enabled highly-trained IT staff to work on more complicated projects.
IT Server Management
2. Decommission Servers 83% Faster while Using Less Staff
To cut costs and operate more efficiently, IT departments will sooner or later want to decommission their comatose and underutilized servers. According to Energy Star, decommissioning just one 1U rack server can save up to $2,500 per year, if you factor in costs for energy, operating system licenses and hardware maintenance.
An arago client managing 200,000 servers for a global company had an overwhelming need for efficiency. The process of decommissioning one server required their staff to manually complete 27 steps and took three to six months in total.
Thanks to knowledge automation, the client could decommission 200 servers a month, saving $6 million dollars annually. Their team specifically automated steps 1 to 13, taking only 10 minutes to complete, and steps 15 to 17. The rest of the steps are carried out manually using just a third of its staff.
Finance
3. Resolve Significant Backlogs
At global supply chain companies, an order backlog for just one month can number in the thousands. Leading steel service company and distributor, Klöckner & Co had just this sort of problem with 15,000 blocked orders every month. Of these, roughly 20% were due to issues stemming from credit limits or overdue payments.
Without knowledge automation, their Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) staff and Accounts Receivable Team had to spend excessive time resolving these issues. They also needed to whittle down the backlog fast in order to provide same-day shipments to customers that would ultimately earn revenue.
Thanks to knowledge automation, Klöckner & Co could train HIRO to understand criteria, like order blocks, dunning levels, a customer’s credit limit tolerance and other factors; HIRO could then decide whether to release a blocked sales order or not on its own. That change reduced processing and resolution time by 80%, and in turn, required much less human intervention.
Human Resources
4. Speed up New Employee Onboarding by up to 99.3%
Now that remote work is the new norm, the employee onboarding checklist has gotten longer, not shorter. For many companies, onboarding a new employee entails remotely coordinating between multiple teams, setting up various business accounts, providing secure access to company technologies and more.
Like many companies, one arago client was struggling with an inefficient onboarding process. That process took 3 days to complete and consisted of 27 different tasks, such as creating a new email ID, transferring data to HR admin apps and setting up payroll data. With the help of knowledge automation, it could automate 26 of the 27 tasks and complete the entire onboarding process in 10 minutes.
Power New Business Models
5. Scale Robotic Process Automation Seamlessly
Despite the benefits of Robotic Process Automation, RPA bots must be managed and fixed by a team, if they fail. As a result, scaling RPA bots can become costly and problematic, since that team must scale as well.
At the startup, ChoiceWORX, RPA bots provide support and troubleshooting for enterprise customers using desktop applications. Rather than scale up a team, ChoiceWORX relies on knowledge automation to power the software that manages bots and exception handling. In this way, the startup can avoid the cost of scaling up personnel while still expanding their business.
A Whole New Category of Growth
Knowledge Automation is a transformative technology. As seen through the examples above, it can deliver massive new efficiencies, adapt to changing business conditions and scale remarkably well. As we move into a digital-first future, it will prove indispensable for companies seeking everything from bottom-line growth and new revenue streams to a smarter business model.